Vic Socotra

29 July 2008

Before Breakfast

I am with Lewis Carroll this morning, and have had to believe two impossible things before breakfast. Well, I mean, I didn’t have to.

That is like the global warming thing, which would be three, and the outsized carbon footprint that the common wisdom has attached to us. That would be four, and altogether too many.

The latter are different, since they are consensus truth, and not impossible.

Over the last couple years we have adopted a collective embarrassment about the expansive way we live. It is like all Americans have become members of the Sasquatch tribe, Bigfeet shambling destructively across the world.

I am supposed to believe that, and being a gregarious creature, I am Sasquatch enough to go along with it. But there are other things we are=2 0not supposed to believe.

Like the mind-boggling article in the New York Times that claims a dozen reliable witnesses, all of them aviation professionals, who witnessed a saucer-shaped object hovering over Gate C-17 at Chicago O’Hare International, one of the busiest airports in the known world.

It happened at four-thirty in the afternoon on the 7th of November, 2006. It took a while for the news to get out, since the Transportation Security Administration, the FAA and the Department of Homeland Security apparently could not get the aliens to remove their shoes and belts, nor place all gels and liquids in containers 3-ounces-or-less in volume in a plastic bag for ready inspection by courteous TSA personnel.

I did not hear about it at the time, or I would have looked with more curiosity when I got off the jetway near there last Friday, or when I got back on the flight from O’Hare to Washington on Sunday.

Apparently the FAA was stonewalling the story, and only an intrepid reporter was able to get the transcripts of the chatter on the ground frequencies at the airport reporting the sighting. None of the pilots would comment, though at least one of them had a digital camera.

The flight line employees were not so intimidated, and one of them, a professional entrusted with driving jetliners around under their own power on the ground, gave a blow-by-blow description of the appearance that was stark, simple and apparently accurate.

The FAA said there was no radar to confirm the visual reports, so obviously it didn’t exist. Considering we are retiring our first generation of radar-evading night fighters, I think that is a bit disingenuous, but what do I know.

You would think that DHS would be uptight about the appearance of a flying machine in the high-density restricted area, but maybe they known something they are not telling us. Like they knew it was not a terrorist plot, but something else altogether.

I think that is giving too much credit to the government, though, and it is more the “deer in the headlights” look you get when something you really don’t want to talk to happens.
Maybe it was just that gate C-17 was occupied, and the aliens hadn’t checked luggage anyway.

So there was that to digest before breakfast, and then word from a scientific journal that claimed the Russians had well established that oil is not produced by the disintegration of organic matter, but is produced naturally deep in the earth, and leaks upward to be trapped in large underground reservoirs.

Uncle Joe Stalin commissioned a Manhattan-style project in the early fifties to exploit the theory, since it looked like his erstwhile allies were going to shut him out of the Mid-East oil supply. The Russians apparently drill to a depth of some six or seven miles to access the non-organic oil, and they have plenty.

The mind reels at the possibility. Years ago, The Atlantic Monthly argued the same thing about natural gas, that there was an almost unlimited quantity that would disrupt the entire global energy scheme. It intimated that the Japanese were going to deep-drill, and find out for sure.

I haven’t heard a thing about it since, and I suppose I just assumed it was another one of those cold-fusion water carburetor stories “they don’t want you to know about.”
Or maybe it is like the UFO at gate C-17. With apologies to Mr. Gore, that would be a really inconvenient truth. Think of the impact on the markets.

Thank God it was all before breakfast, and only two impossible things to accommodate. You never know what you are expected to believe the rest of the day.

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